SeaMicro's new servers might have Intel Inside but the rest is all AMD

To think that only 3 years ago we finally saw the end of the legal battle between Intel and AMD over the x86 patent makes today's news bring a smile to those with a certain sense of humour. Some of SeaMicro's new servers will be powered by Intel's Xeon line of processors, meaning that an AMD owned company will be offering Intel Inside. As AMD purchased SeaMicro for their "Freedom" 3D mesh/torus interconnect technology as opposed to an attempt to push Intel out of that particular make of server, this move makes perfect sense as AMD's bottom line will benefit from every sale of an Intel based SeaMicro server. It also opens up the choices available to the market as you will be able to purchase Piledriver based SeaMicro servers using the same interconnect technology.

From The Register we get more information on the Piledriver processors we will see in these servers, they will have eight cores and would come in three speeds; 2GHz, 2.3GHz, and 2.8GHz. They also infer that with this design you could have 512 cores and 4TB of memory in a 10U chassis which is enough to make any SETI@Home or Folding@Home team member drool with jealousy. On the Intel side they will use the 2.5GHz quad core Xeon E3-1265L v2 which means you would only have a mere 256 cores in a similar 10U chassis. DigiTimes also picked up on this story with more details on the insides of the servers, both Intel and AMD.

"SeaMicro is not longer an independent company, but you would not have guessed that if you were dropped in from outer space to attend the launch of the new SM15000 microserver in San Francisco on Monday afternoon. Advanced Micro Devices may own SeaMicro, but the company went out of its way to support the latest "Ivy Bridge" Xeon E3-1200 v2 processor from rival Intel as well as its own forthcoming "Piledriver" Opteron processor as new compute nodes in a new SeaMicro chassis."

Replace 'x86 Patent' lawsuit with 'Antitrust' lawsuit.
The only thing regarding patents was that as part of the 'payoff' winning the lawsuit AMD was able to get a 'royalty-free license to any Intel patents' used in their own x86-style processors.

The actual questionable business practices go further back than that though, even if the court case does not. Think about the secret 386 plans Intel was cropping up, let alone the 586 ... or Pentium ... and the death of Cyrix as a competitor. The only real constant in the battle was the x86 architecture, with side bars into memory interface, bus design, instruction sets, pretty much everything really.